Andrew Walker
Assistant Professor
ajwalk@email.unc.edu
Andrew Walker's research and teaching focus on political interconnections across the hispanophone, francophone, and creolophone Caribbean, especially Haiti and the Dominican Republic. His book manuscript in progress, entitled “Strains of Unity,” explores the 1822-1844 Unification of Hispaniola, during which the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo (today the Dominican Republic) was governed by the post-revolutionary republic of Haiti. The unification brought immediate emancipation and legal racial equality across the island, transforming the oldest slaveholding territory in the Americas into the newest departments of the most radical antislavery state in the world.
His publications include essays in Slavery & Abolition and the Law and History Review. The first piece argues that the 1822 unification was the result of a decades-long antislavery revolution led by Santo Domingo’s majority of free people of African descent, Haitian leaders, and refugees from surrounding slave-holding jurisdictions. The second essay examines the 1816-1817 itinerary of a U.S. warship-turned Cuban slaving vessel, whose mostly-American crew staged a mutiny off of Cape Verde and then sailed on (without a captive cargo) to the antislavery Republic of Haiti.
He is presently engaged in two collaborative projects. The first considers the illegal enslavement and forced introduction into the United States of people who had long lived as free in the wake of the Haitian Revolution. The second explores the political lives of formerly enslaved women within the notarial archives and civil registries of unification-era Santo Domingo. He holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of Michigan (2018) and a B.A. in French Studies and History from Duke University (2011).
